You may be reading this because, like me, you usually spend a few minutes each day making sure you've trawled the main SEO news publications for new, useful thought pieces on organic search, analytics, or other aspects of online marketing. But have you ever thought which of those sites statistically provides the best content? Or have you ever wondered if what people on these sites write about ever really changes? The sunsetting of Google Reader forced me to find out…
I'm sure you're all by now aware of Google Reader's demise; to many of you this story will have barely warranted a second glance, but for an SEO news addict like me it is a serious pain in the ass.
Since March 26, 2009, I have been using Reader's "star" functionality to highlight SEO resources I feel will be useful to me again at some point in the future, or warrant sharing with my team.
The result of this obsessive reading and starring of RSS feeds, usually on the bus in the morning, was an easily-accessible, hand-curated database of great articles covering almost any conceivable SEO topic stretching back 4 years.
While migrating to a new RSS reader, The Old Reader, I realized that I couldn't transfer my starred items.
The good news was Google allowed me to get a backup of them as a .json file. The bad news was that no RSS reader (to my knowledge) had the functionality to import them alongside the feeds I subscribe to.
End result: I was faced with the task of cleaning and formatting the data in the .json file if I wanted to still be able to access my 4 year-old collection of useful blog posts and news items.
I soon realized that although this task was onerous, it would provide me with a great opportunity to: 1. Build a great resource for other SEO professionals 2. Understand how my perception of "a great SEO article" had changed since 2009 3. Rate the major SEO publications based on whose feed had received the most stars.
I won't go through how you can filter and clean a .json file into something useful, but if you want to have a go, you'll probably find it useful to know how to remove blank cells from a list without changing the order of items, how to convert UNIX timestamps to dates, and you'll also need theSEOTools extension for Excel. Contact me if you're interested to know more.
And Now to Give Away 4 Years of Work…
The first thing I want to do is share my article collection. Obviously, whether an article from an RSS feed was starred or not was purely subjective, so I am not saying this is a definitive collection of every amazing article published since 2009!
However, I'm an agency-based SEO working across numerous industries, and while collating this list I have undertaken a range of SEO roles from being in the trenches writing title tags to running an SEO department. As a result I would like to think there is something here for everyone.
So here it is: the full collection of just under 800 fantastic SEO resources.
If you are the author of any of these links I'll take this opportunity to say a big thank you for producing such useful content!
So Which SEO Site Really Has the Best Content?
I wanted to know which industry sites had most frequently posted content I felt was worthy of starring. Thankfully, reader gives an average posts / week for each feed, and I could work out how long I had been subscribed to each feed by looking at dates of the first post starred in that feed and the most recent.
After mashing up that data, I was able to calculate the approximate number of posts each feed had published, and what percentage of them I had starred: ajmalseotips.blogspot.com
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